Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

The World I Live In – a poem by Mary Oliver

John 14:1-12a

You might have noticed that the PRIDE doors we’ve had displayed on the front lawn are down. June is long over, and since we painted those little rainbow beauties specifically for PRIDE month, we knew that it was time for them to come down and move on to their next home. We’ll be keeping the purple door and passing on the rest to other open and affirming churches in town. And the good news on that front is that we have to make choices. We have more open and affirming churches than we have doors. It wasn’t always the case.

There’s a reason, you know, that we fly a rainbow flag off our sanctuary, and placed six doors on our front lawn, and carried them on wheels through the PRIDE parade, and marched in the PRIDE parade for the umpteenth year in a row. We are so public about our stance on LGBTQ inclusion because it’s a pretty major issue in the church today and we want to be clear on which side of the debate we fall. We want people to know that this is a safe place to be LGBTQ, or an ally, AND be Christian. More and more people are abandoning the church, or the church is abandoning them, and we want them to know that the answer they’re getting isn’t the only one. AND we want them to know that abandoning one part of a closed system theology, say the orthodox position on gay people, will invariably mean a change in how you relate to God or Jesus, or the Bible. This is what makes our “debate” on LGBTQ inclusion so difficult in our churches – it isn’t just how we interpret a few verses from the Bible, but how we read the Bible itself, and how it has authority for us. Our rainbow flag outside is a symbol of more than just our stance on LGBTQ persons, but also our stance on the rights and dignity of allpersons. It is an indicator that we subscribe to a kind of open source theology which sees God, Jesus, the Bible, sin, salvation, communion, prayer, forgiveness, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera in a very different way than many other churches around us.

“Open and affirming” means, to me, much more than the welcome of LGBTQ persons into our church. It is rooted in an understanding of our faith lives – is this “way of Jesus” and open door or a closed one? What do I mean by an open door or a closed one? Let me explain it to you in this way. In non-relativistic classical mechanics, a closed system is a physical system that doesn’t exchange any matter with its surroundings, and isn’t subject to any net force whose source is external to the system. I’m glad to have cleared that up for you. A little more? Well, how about this – a closed system can exchange heat with another system, but not matter. In other words, nothing of substance. An open system, however, can exchange energy and substance. An open system is one that interacts with other systems, and changes because of it.

In my research, my education and my experience, Christianity is an open system. It thrives on relationship and interaction. When we practice it, we exchange not only energy with our neighbor, but substance as well. This is why Jesus tells us that we should love not only our neighbor, but our enemy as well. What good does it do to love only those who love you, he asks? That’s an exchange of energy only. When you must try to love your enemy, that’s when you learn to give of yourself, something of your substance to the effort of love. When we close the way of Jesus, making of it an exclusive path, open only via a specific set of beliefs, interpretations and dogma, we render it inert. If it is a closed club, welcoming only those who believe the right way first, we are loving only those who are already lovable, closing that system down to a recycling of the same energy. The power of the way of Jesus is not found in right belief, nor even right action, but in right relationship, in wrestling with the big questions of life and existence and seeking meaning in the nooks and crannies all around us. This is why we come back to the Bible, why we continue to wonder about God and God’s role in life, why we come again to the table or say The Lord’s Prayer yet another Sunday, because our interaction with these things, our wrestling with the transcendent, our metaphorical chewing on the bread of life creates meaning, it helps us make choices about who we are going to be in this world.

And ultimately, at least for me, the choice comes down to this, are we going to be open – open to new ideas, new concepts, new identities, the newness of a God who we claim is still speaking – or are we going to be closed – trapped in tradition, closed to innovation, unwilling to grow or change ourselves because we believe that we possess the truth, final and unedited?

When we hear this passage from John, and we hear it a lot, I think, it can sound pretty exclusive. That’s generally the way that I hear it interpreted, from a literal position. But you can’t pluck it from the chapter in which it is held, nor can you use a highly symbolic and metaphorical gospel like John to make wooden and literal points. In Mary Oliver’s beautiful poem, no one thinks that when she speaks of “angels in your head” that she is speaking literally. I doubt anyone would try to make an assertion that one must acquire and maintain “head angels” as the only way to develop a notion of a wide and amazing world based on this language. Rather they understand it as poetic – angels in our heads taking it’s place in our imagination like President Lincoln referring to the “better angels of our natures.” John’s language, too, is poetic, not literal.

The sad thing to me is that I think this passage is meant to be an inclusive one, and we’ve turned it into an exclusive one. John’s Gospel is full of cultural hooks that we don’t get – we’re not first century, Greek-speaking, Jewish-influenced Mediterranean people after all. We hear Jesus saying, “I am the way, the truth and the life and no one comes to the Father but through me”, and think that this, of course, means that Christianity has a firm and total grip on the keys to St. Peter’s gate. Sorry, everyone else. The poetic language, however, builds on a Hebrew concept, present heavily in Proverbs, of wisdom as “the Way” – a wisdom that isn’t intellectual but habitual, found in a well-worn path of behavior that infuses in us an internal disposition, a transformed heart. This, Jesus says, is the way to God. It is found in being like Jesus, we would say as Christians. But believe me when I say that I know so many Muslims and Jews and Hindus and Buddhists and people of no faith tradition at all who act more like Jesus than many of his self-professed followers. Are we really going to place stock in a faith that claims those who have been through a little ritual but remain exploitative, rude and even cruel to the creation around them are in, but those who have not professed Christ and yet live in a Christ-like manner are out?

Peter Rollins, who is a theologically rebellious, beer-drinking Irish philosopher (I love him already) tells a parable about leaving church – an exit parable he calls it – and it goes like this: A man dies and he goes to heaven and arrives at the gates in front of St. Peter, just like we’ve always been told. And Peter opens the gates wide and spreads open his arms and says, “Oh, Dominic, great to see you! Welcome!” And he’s just about to step into heaven and he notices that some of his friends are there – Amal, who is Muslim, Naomi, who is Jewish and Bet, who is a Buddhist. And he says, “Peter – what about them?” And Peter replies, kind of sheepishly, “Oh well, you know the rules…” Dominic stops for a moment. And he thinks about his own life, his own faith, and he remembers the rebel Jesus, the outsider, the one who is always eating with the sinners, sharing what he has with the downtrodden and oppressed, standing alongside the cast-out and he says, “You know what? I think I’ll just stay out here with them.” And a smile slowly breaks out over St. Peter’s face and he says, “At last you understand.”

The reason that we claim this title “open & affirming” began with an invitation to the Gay & Lesbian communities to be a part of our congregation, fully and completely. And then we found out if we’re going to do that effectively, that we had to change. Then the “gay & lesbian” community became the LGBT community, and more expansion of our hearts and minds. Now the LGBTQIA+++ community, which is evolving every day it seems as we expand the idea of human potential and identities. And so, too, our hearts and minds must grow. But it doesn’t stop there, for the arrival at this place of growth, at a desire to expand and welcome, begins with an open system and a deeply formed realization that the image of God is broad and expansive, like the galaxy, not limited to our capacity to see our understand. It means, to me, that the age of monopolies on God are over, and that the sustainable and healthy path forward will necessarily mean that we walk together, acknowledging and even celebrating our difference. That is the kind of trust in God’s creation that Jesus displays, and if we have the same kind of trust it won’t be shown in the number of Bible verses we have memorized or the size of our church buildings. They’ll know we are Christians by our love.

Another famous passage from John says it like this, again through the power of poetry — For God so loved the world that God came to be in it – that God took the form of flesh, like all of us, and lived the fullness of incarnation, embracing those we have called unclean, leaping across the social barriers we have carefully constructed, healing the sick, loving the enemy, tending to the broken, speaking truth to power and telling us again and again that the way to God is love. When we do these things, we experience God. When we live these things, we know Jesus. When we trust in these things, we walk in the Spirit. And that, my friends, is the way, and the truth and the life.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Genesis 4:4-7 & John 9:1-12

The problem is sin. The problem is sin and we agin’ it!! That’s how it starts off, I’m sure some of you are aware, and then the talk about Jesus as the solution, or more specifically the sacrifice of Jesus as the solution to the anger of God produced by our sin. The God of love so angry that only his son’s brutal death will appease him. But don’t worry, it happened and now he loves us again.

So let me confess, probably won’t be a shock to you, that I don’t believe that Jesus died for our sins, at least in what I would call a conventional sense. But, I do believe that sin is a problem. Also not in the way that we’ve been told, at least most of us, all of our lives. We’ve spend the last few Sundays revisiting God, Jesus and the Bible, and now we turn to some very foundational theological concepts for Christians – sin and salvation. And for that I’m going to have us look at a specific and very poignant example.

It’s easy to look at the horrific pictures of small children locked up in pens, to hear the heartbreaking stories of the forced separation from parents, of children not allowed to touch their brothers and sisters, of one year-olds placed in front of immigration judges for a court proceeding with no representation and be outraged. That is easy. And right. And it’s easy to point fingers and assign blame and cast disparagement at people whose policies have caused this immediate crisis. It is easy. And right.

What is less easy is to be aware of how we got to this place. What is less easy is to see how complicated this situation is and how many working parts make up this machine of dehumanization and greed. What is less easy is to make the connection between those heartbreaking images and our $8 t-shirts, or our year-round bananas, our quick roof repairs after a hailstorm or our well-mowed green spaces. What is less easy is to understand that we are part of something larger, part of a combination of individual and corporate sin, and none of us is pure or unstained.

It’s a harsh reality. And it is the only way I ever have any connection to one of the central tenets of fundamentalist Christianity – the so-called “doctrine of original sin.” Because we don’t often, in the so-called “progressive” church, speak about personal sin, typically because the people who sit in our sanctuaries have had sin used as a club, to beat them into submission. This stands in direct contrast to the practice of Jesus, who does talk about sin, but doesn’t wield it against people. As Russell Rathburn says in his commentary on the passage from John, “The Pharisees…see God work as restrictive. Jesus sees God’s work as permissive. They see sin as transgressing the restricted, Jesus sees sin as limiting the continuing of God’s work of creation, that work which is imaged from Genesis forward as bringing light into the darkness.”

How we think about “sin” matters. If it is only a list of prohibited actions, then we’ve missed the point entirely. It is, after all, totally possible for me to follow the rules and act immorally. It was the defense at the Nuremberg trials, “I was only following orders.” The point of the lists in some parts of the Bible is to evoke in the followers a sense of morality that is inherent, not depended on legislation to tell us what to do…or not do. But we have our idea of sin all out of whack. We keep trying to refine the list, acting like we may not know exactly what sin is, but we know it when we see it. But Jesus teaches us this – that which harms is sin. That which does not promote life is sin. He says take the 2×4 out of your own eye before you point fingers at the toothpick in someone else’s eye. In other words, sin never works aimed at someone else. My knowing that there is evil in the world is one thing, my knowing that I can sometimes contribute to that evil is another. Let me be clear, I don’t think that I intent evil, but there is intent and there is impact. Living my life as a straight, white, cis-gendered male in this world means that I will impact others in a negative way despite my intent to not do so. Because I participate in the systems that are evil, without meaning to do so. As we head into the 100th anniversary of one of the worst race massacres in our nation’s history right here in Tulsa, we should be painfully aware of how we have not named the sin of those days, and how that lack of seeing makes our reconciliation so hard, if not impossible.

So, while it seems important to know what constitutes this life-denying, hurtful thing we call sin, it can be difficult to define, because it is so contextual. Here are just a few comments on sin from our tradition through the centuries:

• In Judaism, sin is “missing the mark”; refusing to listen to God; a wrongful path; hardness of heart; stiffness of neck; Rabbi Abraham Joshua Herschel called it; “a refusal of humans to become who we are”
• Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th century Christian mystic, theologian, scientist, and artist says that
  sin is drying up. It is care-less-ness; as in not caring. It is also “uselessness”; lack of passion; sterility. Those who do good are like an orchard full of good fruit. If we do evil, we shall remain sterile in God’s eyes.
• Contemporary Roman Catholic liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez says simply this:
  Sin is denial of love.
• Langdon Gilkey, a 20th century, U.S. Protestant theologian, who was my conversation partner for my final theology paper in seminary says, “Sin may be defined as an ultimate religious devotion to a finite interest.”
• Rosemary Radford Reuther, a contemporary, Roman Catholic, feminist theologian, says:
  “What is appropriately called sin…lies in the distortion of relationship, the absolutizing of the rights of life and power on one side of a relation against the other parts with which it is, in fact, interdependent.”

The distortion of relationship, care-less-ness, an ultimate religious devotion to a finite interest. Boy does that last description hit home? For what do we see around us now but almost fanatical devotions to political or ideological ideas as if they were ultimate truth? It makes me think of the immigration crisis as an example of sin…primarily systemic, but driven by a personal devotion to a finite interest, a twisted narrative that both wants to claim the United States as a immigrant story and deny the reality of colonization, a narrative that wants to reject people from certain countries while ignoring our own role in the histories of those same countries economic and social plight…a distortion of relationship.

Personal transformation is good. Reconciliation from personal “sin” is good, but that does not change the systems in which we are bound — racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, etc. We may rightly admit to our personal racist notions and seek to admonish them in our lives, but that does not end the systemic weight of racism. And that is the double whammy of this thing we call sin. There is a personal component, yes, but our focus on that often pulls us away from the larger and more nefarious side of sin – the systemic sin that we create which alienate and isolate, which break relationship and seek power over justice, choosing not to see, hear or understand certain people in favor of others.

What if we moved beyond the language and liturgy that speaks of sins as only personal and our need for forgiveness? What if we acknowledged sin as a power that seems to hold us in bondage? What if we imagined, as the Psalms do, of sin that rules our lives like an unwanted Pharaoh, or keeps us in exile as if we were trapped in Babylon, or blinds us with self-interest, keeping us attached to distraction and entertainment as a means of anesthetizing the pain that is around us? What if we thought of sin more like idolatry, getting the centers of our lives confused, our identities tied up with the wrong things?

Now I’ve spent all this time on sin and the title of the sermon is sin AND salvation. So, I’d better get moving. Fortunately, the second part is deeply connected to the first. If sins are the things that take life and deny love, then salvation is that which brings life and love. Salvation, like sin, looks different in different places. Sometimes it is liberation from bondage, real or spiritual. Sometimes it is economic or cultural. It may mean finding a place where you are truly accepted for who you are, or finding your meaning in being that place of sanctuary for others. It can be a move from sickness to health, from fear to trust, or something more systemic, like a move from injustice to justice or violence to peace. And, yes, it may even mean a salvation to come. Our opening song, Orphan Girl, by Gillian Welch, tells the story of an orphan with no family who sees no possibility of that relationship in her life so her salvation she envisions coming at her death when she meets her family at God’s table. But I don’t think salvation is primarily talking about our afterlife, rather it is concerned with here and now, with what Marcus Borg calls the “twofold transformation of ourselves and the world.” This may be more radical a shift than we think – but what if we no longer thought of our salvation as primarily about an afterlife? What is the point of Christianity then? What if it isn’t about the prize at the end of the race at all, but the race itself? And what if our salvation is not the forgiveness of sins, but our liberation from sin? What if our stories about Jesus are here to remind us of what Dr. Borg calls the “three tenses” of salvation – what God has done in the past, what can happen in the present and what has not yet happened, what is not completed, neither for us as individuals nor for the world?

We live perhaps more than we’d like to admit in the same sin scenario that Jesus did, where a person’s misfortune is a result of their sin. He refutes that. I hope we heard that clearly this morning in John’s gospel. Jesus calls that bunk. And he uses this encounter with a blind man to make his point to the Pharisees about their own blindness. Perhaps this is the whole work of sin and salvation, helping us to understand the ways in which we are blind – blind to our own transgressions, blind to one another, blind to brokenness which we may not have even created, but in which we participate. And that blindness is precisely what Jesus came to save us from, letting us see in his own life how we might continually work to shift our centers away from the pharaohs and the Babylons of this world, binding and exiling us, and towards the God of liberation, seeking our wholeness, transforming our hearts and minds and souls. Let us not lose sight of how Jesus’ actions change the expected story in John’s Gospel, surprising everyone with God’s love for this so-called sinner…letting the blind man, and maybe others, too, see again, like Amazing Grace…

I once was lost but now I’m found, was blind but now I see.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Psalm 1:1-3 & Romans 15:4-7 and 9b-13

July 15^th, 2018

We have had quite the buildup over the past week or so towards the naming of a candidate to replace Justice Kennedy on the Supreme Court. Now I raise this not for the political hay that could be gathered with such a topic, but instead to help us think about how we use the Bible. What’s that you say, pastor? How can the naming of a Supreme Court Justice help us talk about the Bible? Well, I’m glad you asked.

Speaking Christian, by the late Dr. Marcus Borg, has helped inform this series of sermons during our July worship on the foundational components of Christianity. In his chapter on the Bible, Dr. Borg offers an admittedly shallow analogy. The Bible is authoritative for us as Christians as the Constitution is authoritative for us as Americans. In other words, the Bible was formed not as a single collection handed down from the clouds in King James English, but rather through a process, and a convoluted process at that, including translations through multiple languages using incomplete and perhaps even inaccurate manuscripts and the heavy influence of politics, power and control. It is authoritative because it was declared to be so and is accepted as such by the Christian community, just as the Constitution is accepted as authoritative by the citizens of the United States of America.

The reason that I think this is a decent analogy is that none of us think of either the Constitution or the Bible as ultimatelyauthoritative. As citizens of the United States, we sometimes lean hard on the Constitution, as a protection of free speech or the right to own guns. Likewise, as citizens of the United States, we sometimes refute the authority of the Constitution, on things like free speech or the right to own guns. Our Constitution is full of amendments, 27 of them to be exact, meaning that there is some recognition that the Constitution’s authority is at leastevolving.

Maybe the same is true for our Bible, a collection of stories about God written in different generations, sometimes with powerful, moral, some might even say “eternal” truths, and sometimes only a reflection of the bias and prejudice of the time. And maybe, as we say in the UCC, God is still speaking, unconfined by the canon which we have declared final and definitive, but which doesn’t containGod. The Bible is a human product, not a divine one. And the evidence for this is quite overwhelming. This does not mean that there is no wisdom or authority in the Bible, rather that is is a collection of writings about how our Jewish and Christian spiritual ancestors saw God, not the way God see things (if we can even know how God sees things).

The point of the Bible is not to have all of the rules written down in one place, just as the point of the law is not to enforce the law…at least this is what many prophets from Isaiah to Jesus have taught again and again. The point of the Bible is to give us some foundational help, some record of the journeys that people who have come before us have taken, so we don’t have to re-invent the map each and every time someone seeks God. We have the psalms to help us sing our way towards a God who seems sometimes right beside us and often distant and removed. We have the wisdom stories to remind us that there is a time for everything under the sun and that we are not in control, as much as we’d like to be…sometimes we can’t understand suffering. We have the amazing tales from Genesis and Ruth, Esther and Exodus to illuminate how much God works outside our boundaries and against the grain of what we consider normative. We have the prophets to speak a word to us about God’s judgment, the sense that we reap what we sow, that instant karma’s gonna get you. We have the gospels to teach us basic tenets as Christians, the beatitudes and the parables to provide us fuel for changing our hearts, the letters of Paul and the Epistles to give us a glimpse of how hard the Gospel work can be and the book of Revelation for…well, sort of a horror/action movie break in the flow?

If you were to suggest that we just take the Book of Revelation out of the Bible, you wouldn’t be the first. It had a pretty hard time making it in the Bible in the first place – it was a compromise, like the decision in the Constitution to have the President elected by the electoral college instead of the popular vote. Sometimes ideas seem really good at one time in history and not so good later.

One of the primary reasons that I chose to have our third sermon on the foundational parts of our faith be the Bible, just after God and Jesus, is this – we are living in another reformation, about 500 years after the one that created this church, distinct in many ways from the Catholic Church, which was the onlychurch in the western European tradition before the Reformation. When Martin Luther demanded that the Catholic Church show him wherein the Bibleit said to do some of the things that the Church did, they answered him by saying – just because it isn’t in the Bible doesn’t mean we can’t do it. And Luther responded – I disagree. Or words rather more harsh than that. Sola Scripturabecame one of his major points – in lieu of the Church’s authority, followers of Christianity had to have another source, so it became the Bible. And now, about 500 years later, we are perhaps thinking that was not the best decision. Because what has happened is that people are able to justify all kinds of things by finding a single line in the Bible that supports it, and since the Bible is a vast collection of different opinions about God without a single, authoritative character of the Divine…well, you can make almost anything Biblical.

One of the major characteristics sought by the President in a candidate for the Supreme Court was that he or she would be a so-called “strict interpreter” of the Constitution. In other words, this person would interpret the law based on the “original intent” of the framers of the Constitution. This is what I can fundamentalist constitutionality. It assumes many things. First, that we can decipher correctly the “original intent” of people who lived over 200 years ago. We find it nearly impossible to determine intent in a court of law today, when the witnesses are right there and the incident took place three months ago rather than in 1776. Intent is so hard because people don’t communicate intent typically, especially in political situations, and often are unclear about their intent in the first place. Maybe they have dual intent or even conflicting intent. It is an assertion of fundamentalism, which depends on the belief that we canknow original intent. The same is true of fundamentalism with the Bible, which must maintain that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, infallible and completely authoritative. Any threat to that assertion is a threat to the whole structure.

Throughout the history of our faith, the Bible has been called the “Word of God,” but not the “words of God,” and the distinction matters a great deal. In the Hebrew Bible, the “word” is the law, theactions, not the words,of people bound by the covenant between human beings and God. And in the New Testament, the “Word” takes on a whole new meaning. When you read John’s Gospel, for instance, the metaphor of “the Word” is Jesus, not the Bible. The claim is that the Word has been made flesh, not paper. This is one reason that many of us who do not read the Bible from a fundamentalist perspective continue to read it, only we read it through the lens of Jesus.

We cannot know the original intent of the authors, we can only say that if our ideals come from the teachings and examples of Jesus then we have to interpret some parts of the Bible differently than others. The parts that speak of God commanding “God’s people” to kill people who aren’t “God’s people” are tempered by a Jesus who reminds us that everyone is part of the “God’s people” camp. The “eye for an eye” passages become “turn the other cheek” passages, the “don’t kill” passages become “watch even your anger” passages and the “love your neighbor” passages become “love even your enemies” passages. Reading the Bible through the lens of Jesus doesn’t make it softer or easier, it makes us read the Bible looking for images of a God of love – and love is always a more challenging road than hate.

We have, in the progressive church, kind of thrown the baby out with the bathwater in regards to the Bible. Having it wielded as a weapon against us so often, we have failed to take it seriously and to see in it a basis for us as people of faith, even with it’s flaws and blemishes. We can best understand the Bible when we read it in it’s social-historical context and try to decipher not only what we can glean of “original intent”, but also when we understand more fully the metaphorical meanings present in the words. We need the Bible, if nothing else than to keep us from entirely inventing things of our own accord, fashioning a Jesus who is entirely friendly to us and our needs. The Bible, in this sense, becomes not so much a rulebook as a guidebook – advice from people throughout the centuries on their journey down this same path towards God.

This is the record of our tradition, too, and in learning how to read it we can discover why we read it. We can build our skills in determining which parts are more about a person or persons’ political agenda, and which parts we feel compelled to believe are the vision of God. AND we can also come to terms with this whole “Word of God” phrase that hangs over Christianity’s last 200 years like nothing else. For us as Christians we can embrace this simple idea – the Word is Jesus. And that word outranks the Bible, for the Bible reveals Jesus to us, it isn’t Jesus. The Bible illuminates God, it isn’t God. As Dr. Borg wrote, echoing Martin Luther, the Bible is the manger in which we find Christ where we first hear his story, so we may hear it again and again.

May it be so.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Psalm 123 (The Inclusive Psalms translation)

Mark 6:1-13 (Common English Bible translation)

It seems hardly necessary to remind us this morning, here in a church, that we are followers of Jesus. It seems unnecessary, but bearing witness to the recent actions of many who claim to also be followers of Jesus, the detention of asylum-seekers, the separation of children from their parents, the many examples of mistreatment of the weak by the strong, one might think that we need to reconsider what we thought unnecessary. After all, it seems like we don’t even know who this Jesus is to whom we sing praises and pledge our lives.

We’re not alone, of course. Even when Jesus returns to his own hometown, people don’t understand him…in his own hometown! I mean they are astounded by his teachings, amazed at his miracles, and flabbergasted that this is little Jesus, Mary and Joseph’s son. And then the telltale line. In our translation this morning, the Common English, it reads – “They were repulsed by him and fell into sin.” In the New Revised Standard, it is even more direct – “And they took offense at him.” The word in Greek is eskandalo, which, as you might have heard, lends itself to our english word “scandal.” Jesus was a scandal. Or, better said, Jesus scandalized them.

Maybe that’s why we often keep him at arms’ length, this Jesus of Nazareth. Some of his greatest hits? Love your enemies…God or money, you have to choose…don’t worry about anything, just seek God…rejoice when you are persecuted for my sake…deny the weak and you deny him…and my personal favorite super-hard Jesus quote…you must deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me. These are not exactly warm-and-fuzzy, simple instructions…more like ingredients for a revolution, and they still are. 2000 years later we have so effectively NOT implemented the Jesus plan that his words still scandalize us. It’s why I think that people look for every loophole to place a monument to the Ten Commandments on the statehouse lawn, but no one ever emblazons a public office building with The Beatitudes – blessed are the meek? The merciful? The peacemakers?

Yet this is what I think we need more of from Jesus. A little scandal in our lives is a good thing, a chance to wake us up from the numbing flow of our consumption culture, which makes meaning only from money, stuff and celebrity. If we’re not careful we can slip into a place where the cry of need from the psalmist sounds like a foreign language, unfamiliar and needy. After all, we’ve set things up so we can choose God, a concept Jesus found not only strange, but unholy.

Might it be that if Jesus were here today he would also find our faith like that of his neighbors from Nazareth – would he be amazed at our unbelief? Believe me I am sincere when I say that this sermon is not aimed at you, it is aimed at me. Here’s why.
I question all the time what we can possibly do about poverty or violence, about an education system that fails so many or an immigration system that has turned not only unjust but cruel. I wonder if it matters that we collect some food in a wagon every once in a while, or feed a couple hundred once a month or shelter a single refugee or find a home or a ride for someone attending their asylum hearing? I sometimes wonder if my faith isn’t just a waste of time, a trivial dog and pony show, writing letters and carrying signs and holding meetings that simply reinforce a silly notion that God actually cares about us and change can happen.

What gets me off that unhealthy and unhelpful track? Jesus. I think of him holding that tension in both hands in the garden of Gethsemane, where he asks God to take the cup from him, to change the path that he sees in front of him because it can’t end well…can it? How can it happen? How can it end well? And I think of him making that simple statement…the statement we say every Sunday in the Lord’s Prayer – but your will, not mine. Your will, O God.

See I need that kind of discipline. I need the road ahead to not be dictated by my own feelings and proclivities. Because left to me, I’m just as vindictive as the next guy and there’ll come a time very soon when I won’t turn the other cheek. I need that discipline that says – this is not what we do. Not our will, but God’s will. Let that be done. That’s why we come together as followers of Jesus, not for the companionship or because we like each other, though those are good things. No, it’s for the discipleship. We need it, and when we have it…when we work together…that’s when God acts, our faith a kind of fuel for the effort. When Jesus is back home in Nazareth, our story tells us, he couldn’t do much of anything. “…he could do no deed of power there,” the story goes, presumably because they didn’t think much of him. He was just the carpenter’s son, his sisters still wandering through the town. He was nothing special. There was no fuel.

Over the past two weeks a group of activists and concerned citizens have been having impromptu discussions on a path going forward. If you don’t know this already, our city has a direct connection to the tragic chaos going on at our southern border as a direct result of this administration’s unjust “zero tolerance” immigration policies. See, our county jail downtown has an IGSA – an “inter-governmental service agreement” – with ICE, meaning it can be a holding cell for those asylum seekers caught up in this cruel net the government has cast. Currently we have close to 100 men from many different countries, seeking asylum and getting incarceration. And the questions this raises for those of us morally outraged and seeking to do something go like this:

• Should we seek to support these men inside, or does that mean cooperation with the unjust system?
• If we help, what is the legal liability for those who aid an asylum-seeker? Can we get arrested? Should we get arrested?
• What kind of protest do we have? Are we still trying to be peace, or do our words and our tactics give way to the amount of anger we have on our hearts?

I’m not going to suggest this morning that there are right answers to any of these questions. There are, however, answers. And quite distinct from any discussion I might have on the divinity of Jesus, or his relationship to God and the Holy Spirit, whether or not he is of “one substance with the Father, begotten not made”, I have Jesus as model, his teachings, his life, his death and his resurrection standing beside me, leaning on my shoulder like a holy conscience, whispering the subversive wisdom of the beatitudes, teaching me in parables, suggesting that I walk with him, and telling me in no uncertain terms that love is the answer…a love that will cost me something. It’s pretty annoying, and fairly scandalizing…Jesus as provocateur.

Let us not leave the sermon this morning without noticing, however, the next chapter of the story. Jesus goes to the disciples, he tells them to preach and teach. He instructs them to welcome and include. He asks that they show mercy and forgive, that they clothe and feed, touch, and heal. He commands them to speak out against evil and fight injustice. The carpenter’s son, the Son of Man, the Son of God, however you frame it – he teaches them to love…and they love, and then, they love some more. In fact, the later writings of Paul and the disciples say it over and over again – first love. Love wastefully and faithfully and know that if you do it well, it will cost you…and change you.

We are sent out in his name, to do the same.
Strength for the journey, friends…strength for the journey. Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Mark 5:21-43 (Common English Bible translation)

In the early 1900s from a small desk in a patent office in Bern, Switzerland, a young unknown proposed a theory that revolutionized the known laws of physics. It came to be known as the general theory of relativity and that unknown was, of course, Albert Einstein – a far from unknown now, considered perhaps the greatest genius of the 20th century. He was, as you might know, working off of Sir Isaac Newton’s theories of gravity, thereby superseding 200 years of mechanical theory once dreamed up by Newton quite in opposition to the prevailing theories of Newton’s time. And before them both came Galileo, who was declared a heretic by the church for daring to assert that the earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around, despite his ample body of work describing what he termed “God’s creation” all around them. All of them groundbreaking genius and all, we are slowly discovering, wrong, or at least not totally right, in their assertions about how the universe works.
Science has, at least for all of our lifetimes, been the language with which we describe the world and talk about “reality.” We use it to explain things all around us, the things we can see, like trees and stars, and the things we can’t, like viruses and atoms. And yet science, we must admit, is wrong, or at least not totally right. Just when we think that we have something figured out, a new discovery is made, a new theory proposed, our previous understanding expands.

The same, I believe is true of this something we call God. Any general reading of the Bible would leave you with a rightly confusing picture of the character of God. Is the God of Exodus, liberator and provider, the same God as the God of Job, who seems to punish a poor guy on a bet? Is the God of Jesus, who accepts people across the boundaries of tribe, race and even religion, the same as the God of Revelation, who comes with fiery vengeance to slay the enemies of “God’s people,” enemies who, we suppose from the previous version of God, are also God’s people? Is the God who walks beside Adam and Eve in the garden the same as the God who the Psalmist cries out to, saying “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” Are these different gods, or just different interpretations of God? Are some wrong and some right, or, like scientific theories, do we just get a portion correct as we seek to define the nature of God, a nature that is ultimately undefinable? Maybe these are simply all a reframing of God, made when we get more information or have different experiences.

The woman who is suffering from a hemorrhage in our gospel story this morning lives in a world where God works a certain way. She’s bee told over and over that God is static, certain and predictable. If she is suffering from this bleeding, or any illness for that matter, if she has something bad happening to her at all, then it is because she has done something bad. That’s how God works in that time and place, only Jesus has different ideas. Some of his followers 2000 years later seem not to have gotten the message but I hope we can notice this morning that Jesus does not follow the same equation. He points out that the woman reaches out for him anyway, despite this punitive God image she has been saddled with, and he calls that something remarkable – faith. The equation of Jesus is, “do not fear, but be faithful.” In other words, don’t assume that because you think God zigs, God can’t zag. Or, even another way, the way you practice God is at least as important, if not more so, than what you think about God.

This is a difficult think to understand. It was difficult for even the disciples of Jesus, as it is difficult for us today. Once you think you have God grasped and contained, you no longer have God. Taoism says it like this – the tao that can be told is not the eternal tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. God, and all of this language we use about and around God, all of our liturgical rhetoric and hymns and sermons and scriptures, they are all words about God, not God. They are symbols for God, a way to grasp at the ungraspable, a way to speak of that which cannot really be described, so we use words that approximate – God is like a Father, or a Mother, or a Son, or a Spirit. God is a burning bush or a still, silent voice. These are all symbols, but when we combine that symbolism with the reality that we have a hard time as human beings separating the symbol from God, it becomes critical that we pay attention to our symbols, that we are aware of their power.

This is the kind of conversation I am having in lots of different ways with people a lot like you – those who grew up with a different theology and are now trying to re-imagine not only their faith, but finding that challenging without re-thinking God. Maybe you grew up thinking that the highest good was “getting saved”, but now you witness the actions of people who have “been saved” and you question if that alone can be something called salvation. Maybe you question a lot of what it means to appeal to our highest good, what exactly makes up our most profound truth, or what constitutes beauty, life or love. For some that means that they abandon the idea of God, though when I encounter people who have claimed the title “atheist” I typically ask them to tell me about the God they don’t believe in and, wouldn’t you know it, it’s an angry, punitive God with a long-white beard who lives behind that cloud up there. So then I tell them, hey, I guess I’m an atheist, too because I don’t believe that God is a person at all. Rather I understand that we talk about God as if God were a person because we have to use metaphors to describe something that is really beyond our ability to describe. God is what we call the energy that binds us all together, the unknowable “X” in the equation of the Big Bang, the force behind gravity, the deep sense of awe or reverence if you’ve been lucky enough to see the Milky Way stretched out across the sky on a clear summer night away from city lights. God is the source of the warmth we feel in our hearts when we see someone we love, or the compassion we feel when we see suffering, but that’s very hard to work into liturgy or a hymn, unless we say that God is spirit, or love, or a mystery, which is what we often do say…what else is there to say?

I happen to believe that all of this wondering about God is a good thing, even with no resolution. Engaging with something we don’t have all figured out is good for our souls, particularly right now as the uncertainty and chaos of the times in which we live fills us with anxiousness, for it helps us build that soul muscle that doesn’t need to be able to see something to trust in it. And when we do not know what the world has in store for us, it is good to have a well-developed sense of trust that this something we call God, which is elusive and feels sometimes absent does in fact hold us fast—as if arms were wrapped around us, personified as the voice of a loving parent, giving us peace and security and even courage for the living of these days.

That is what we are trying to reinforce with this worship. This is a chance to hear some carefully chosen symbolic language and also to have no language, to let time and music, prayer and spirit work on us, nourishing our souls by engaging the rituals of our tradition, focusing our attention on this table of welcome and inclusion and opening ourselves up to where God might be present for us this morning…this God who is more like the wind than this solid table, more like a poetry than prose,
more like a tiny, flickering candle than a giant neon sign.

So, here in this space, where we have some room to move around, we have…

• a prayer bench, with pillows if you want to kneel
• a candle-lighting prayer station, where you can bring some of that mystery forth, turning over your troubles, your joys to the soft flicker of the candle
• an offering station – where you may give of your time and your treasure, drop your offering here or volunteer your time in service to your community
• and, of course, communion – which will be done both through intinction (dipping)
  and with a tray, the familiar cup method, because welcome and inclusion necessitates
  flexibility and choice…

If we believe God to be changing, or at least our perception of God to be changing…if we trust that God is a God of creativity and newness…if we hope that as we do not see a way for God to act, God can indeed act…then our worship ought to reflect those things. It doesn’t mean we can’t have some foundations, it doesn’t mean that we can’t have reliable and familiar, it just means that if we don’t make room for God to be present with us…if we expect God to always show up in the prescribed format…maybe we’ll miss the God who is still spinning the galaxies, sprouting the new tree, infecting us all with new possibility, new hope, new life…as we seek to comprehend the mystery that is God, with our hearts, our hands, our voices and, yes, even our heads…

May God be with us…in all Her mystery.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Parables are hard. Like a zen koan that asks, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” or the old question, “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make an noise?”, parables are by nature unresolved. We can get them translated — find the ancient Greek or the Aramaic or the Latin verse and get those words worked over into English. We can parse the verbs and figure out the syntax, but understanding that doesn’t really help us know how a tiny, tiny seed like a mustard seed is compared to an action of God. God is, after all, large…as Monty Python would say…so absolutely huge. Gosh, we’re all really impressed down here, I can tell you. How does it make sense to portray the Kin-dom of God, the Creator of the universe, with something so small that you couldn’t see it if I held it in my hand right now? And why compare the Kin-dom with a weed, something invasive and problematic? It doesn’t make sense. But then again, the task of the parable is not to understand. It is to know, and to know at some place deeper than our brains.

In her book, Walking on Water, Madeleine L’Engle tells of a young woman who told the author, “I read A Wrinkle in Time when I was eight or nine. I didn’t understand it, but I knew what it was about.” I sometimes feel the same way about Jesus’ parables. I don’t understand them, but I know what they’re about. Jesus taught in parable because he wanted to convey one of the most important of spiritual lessons. Understanding is overrated. We have so much data and information available to us these days, we think that we know lots of things, and we’ve forgotten how to simply wonder about something. Why does a zebra have stripes? Whip out the phone, 10 seconds to Google and you understand about pigmentation and genetic evolution. But, if you’re like me, you are still left wondering…you still don’t know why. And that wondering is half the point.

About this time many of you are preparing to harvest your backyard crops or enjoying the wide range of produce showing up at the farmer’s market. Porter peaches, okra, squash, green beans, maybe some cucumbers or corn or cantaloupe. And very soon, tomatoes, oh my goodness…the tomatoes. If you are growing them yourself, you may not be able to give them away. And of these things started with seeds. Tiny seeds. This bounty, this plentiful food that comes up out of the ground is in itself a clear sign of hope. Life continues. Things break and die and then something else lives, as if God’s creative energy cannot be silenced or buried, it just changes forms. Even as we are faced with dire circumstances, with hard news and a world that seems to fracture by the minute, that life-giving presence stands beside us. The Reign of God is near.

How can that be, we ask ourselves, when we see the pictures we see? How can we understand that when we know what is happening in Syria right now, when we get stories from people in Nicaragua as the chaos and violence increase each day? How can we glibly assert that when we can almost feel the pain of the families who are being torn apart by our own government, seeking asylum from untold violence and hopelessness only to have their babies take from their arms? How, one could easily ask, is the Reign of God near? It seems light years away.

I had a text conversation with our CE Director, J.D. this morning. I’ve been having a lot of them with him lately as he’s been away at Officer’s School in Alabama, away from his family enduring long hours and rigorous training for his military chaplaincy work. It has been immensely difficult for him and hard on his family, and I’ve been trying to offer him what support I can from far away. This morning he texted to me that as he leads chapel this morning he’s going to open with, “No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.” He said how proud he was to represent his Fellowship family in that way and how much it meant to him that there were prayers lifted up for him each week. Then he told me that it was the smaller group discussions where he, a guy from the Black Baptist tradition on the south side of Chicago, was able to sit in a room full of military officials in Alabama and make an argument for inclusion, an argument that he attributes to us. His claim for the acceptance of all people, in the chapel and otherwise, was formed here. It was planted and nurtured here. Not from a place of understanding, because he didn’t understand at first, but finally from a place of knowing. In knowing all of you, this kind of love has grown in his heart, from a tiny seed.

We’re often told that the problem is our faith – it’s just not strong enough. We’re told we need more of it. In fact, that’s how this parable is often interpreted, if you only had faith the size of a tiny mustard seed…you terrible Christian, you. Well, that last part is usually not said out loud, just implied. But what the Gospel really says is this – good news! God isn’t looking for your purity, God is looking for your participation. God isn’t looking for you to fix the world, but neither are you free from being a part of the repair. And more good news – God grades on a curve, a big curve. All God needs is a tiny seed, a pinch of yeast, to grow the garden and leaven the loaf.

So, I’m going to offer us a few possibilities we might consider as we work to make our Christianity smaller, and God’s Reign bigger…a few small changes in the way that we talk and think about our faith, about the way that we practice that faith and even about God that might produce something much larger, not on our timetable…but on God’s. These are seeds, a jar full of mustard seeds, that we can plant as Christians…

1. Less doctrine, more stories…I don’t think that Jesus cares what your atonement theory is, but I do think that he cares about you listening to your neighbor’s story…
2. More honesty on what we think God cares about, even if we have to admit that it’s not what we always care about…at least not yet.
3. Volunteer. As the sign out front says this week, “We rise by lifting others.” If you are feeling down, or depressed, I suggest to you that you find a way to help someone else. You may not understand how that will help, but you will soon know how it does.
4. More grace, less judgment…starting with yourself. And LOTS more humility…starting with everything.
5. Instead of making the gospel about changing everyone else,
let’s remember that it’s really about changing ourselves.

And finally…smile more. Listen to more music. Watch less TV, especially news. Write a letter every now and again…by hand. Make time to be with other people. And have faith, trust – as if the world depended on it – that how you treat the waitstaff, the clerk, your partner, your child, your co-worker, your neighbor, your immigrant neighbor, your gay neighbor, your homeless neighbor, your disabled, addicted or mentally ill neighbor, your Muslim neighbor…your Republican neighbor…how you treat those around you will change the world. How? I don’t know. Seems like such a tiny thing…

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Psalm 139:1-14(CEB)

Mark 2:23-3:6 (CEB)

Summertime and the living is easy….

Though for some of us, it isn’t. Summer is supposed to be break time, vacations and slower pace, lazy days and easy living. Sometimes it means that you work just as hard, you just sweat more. Maybe you’re in heat & air, or you own a pool. Maybe you’re a parent trying to figure out what to do with the kids every day, or a grandparent who is solution #1 to that problem. Maybe you’re one of the many teachers who just starts the next job as summer begins.

It is good to take a break. In fact, I think God wants us to take a break. It’s not something I do very well, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think I should. That’s what the sabbath is all about, a divinely-commanded, fully authorized break. It is the ultimate excuse to not mow the yard, isn’t it? GOD told me not to? I mean, Iwant to, but it’s the law…

We have to be very careful, I think, when we head into the world of Biblical law. My beginning point, and I suspect it is the same for many of you, is that the Bible is NOT inerrant. It is not the written words of God handed down from a cloud in King James’ English. It is a document produced by human beings, many of whom felt they were speaking with or even for God, and then filtered through centuries of culture and translation, sometimes from languages that are no longer even spoken. So when we say the Bible reveals a law from God, there is some work to be done…even in the summer.

When Jesus tells the Pharisees that “The Sabbath was created for humans; humans weren’t created for the Sabbath”, he is directly contradicting not only Jewish culture and tradition, but scripture itself. After all, the idea of “sabbath” is coded into the Torah, even God rests on the seventh day of creation. And Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and several other books assert multiple times that observance of the sabbath is mandatory, and not doing it is punishable, sometimes by death. They are SERIOUS about break time! So, the idea that ‘humanity was made for the Sabbath’ is pretty much status quo at Jesus’ time. Frankly, it continues to be a wildly popular theology today. Maybe not so much the sabbath part, for while we used to have “blue laws” that kept places closed on Sundays, we now have moved past even an acknowledgment of Sunday observance. Soccer tournaments, dance recitals, volleyball, gymnastics, the shift of kids’ activities, shopping, gas and movie theaters, none of those places are hands off on Sundays anymore. Maybe it’s because fewer people go to church, maybe it’s because there is growing awareness that Christianity isn’t the only religion.

So maybe the sabbath isn’t the best example, but the theology of what Jesus is up to in this passage is very clearly present in our world. The Pharisees were a particular expression of Judaism. And they went by the law. They wielded it, in fact, making sure that others were living up to it with public shaming and wooden, literal interpretations. Thatwe still know something about, especially here in the buckle of the Bible Belt. For us it goes like this – God wrote the Bible, every word of which is literally true, and God loves us somuch that humanity better live up to it…or else. In that theology, I’ll call it 90% theology because of how prevalent it is, God is chiefly known as holy, the Bible is the single arbiter of all decisions and humans have to achieve a certain levelof holiness – through following laws and clinging to justifying Biblical scriptures – to be acceptable to God.

This leaves us trying to take rules established for a certain set of people two to four thousand years ago and make them fit in our time and place, like fitting that square peg into that round hole…eventually you have to use a hammer. While it may be driven by the intention to teach morality, there are often wrong ways to do the right thing. The problem with trying to legislate morality is that you have to be very careful and precise when you write the law. In my experience, all a legalistic approach seems to do is encourage people to find loopholes. And if you don’t have them all sewn up, well…they’re off the hook. Teenagers are really good at this. Hey, you didn’t tell me to unload the dishwashertoday…you never said that I was supposed to clean up my clothes AND my shoes…you said to be home at 10pm, you never said what time zone! OK, that last one is a little far-fetched, but I promise you it has been tried. All of a sudden, instead of embracing the spiritof the law, we are bending the letter of the law and doing away with the whole intention for the effort in the first place.

Jesus actually works directly against this idea over and over again in our Gospels. It’s one of the primary reasons the religious authorities don’t like him. It’s not that Jesus is against the laws, in fact more than one Gospel has him claim, rather ominously, that he has not come to destroy the law but to fulfill it. Jesus seems to know that when we practice faith legalistically, as if it were just a set of rules to check-off, we cheapen it’s claim on us and domesticate God to a place where we can handle God. We make God’s relational and transforming love into a transaction and we cheapen God’s grace into conditionality. We don’t embrace what the law is meant to instillin us, we don’t let the laws shape and mold our hearts. So, instead of building some resiliency and discernment in ourselves, we make God a machine that works on a set of gears called “shame” and “reward.”

Jesus pushes back against this and in story after story he breaks the rules, not for the sake of breaking the rules, or because he doesn’t think that the sabbath is a good idea, or that we don’t have to live moral lives. Please note that the text says he it is with anger and grief over their intransigent hearts that he pulls the man with the withered hand up higher so that everyone can see him when he asks his provocative question that demands they weigh doing good over keeping the rule.  In this even and so many others, Jesus tells almost everyone who will listen that their God is too small. If they cannot see past the Sabbath instruction far enough to know that they still need to eat, or that someone needs help, or to have compassion for a man with a withered hand who needs healing, they are missing the point. This is why I think that the lectionary missed the boat when they made their cut of the passage we heard today. They skipped the paragraphs just before this when Jesus says that you cannot put new wine into old wineskins. Perhaps we don’t hear the metaphor anymore since we don’t really use wineskins, but it is a claim that we cannot experience newness that God has for us if we think God is confined to the traditions, or the doctrines, or, one might say today, even the Bible. We need to hear that to remind us, as Jesus did those who were around him, that change only comes when we allow our hearts to be moved, when we shift the way that we seek to relate to God and to each other AND when we acknowledge, as many times as possible, that God is far bigger than our own hearts, far larger than our doctrines and theologies and certainly far more loving than we are.

When we encounter something new that feels and acts like God, even though it defies all of our old expectations, then we may need to throw out our old wineskin to make room for that new wine. That’s not to say that our old rituals are no good and we should throw them out. What I mean by that is that we have to re-imagine things, we have to infuse tradition with new life. Let’s take this table as an example. This is one of the foundational rituals of our faith, one of our sacraments. But what does it evoke in us? Is this a table of membership, only open to those who have professed and been baptized – in the “right” way, of course? Is this a table that is only for Christians, because Jesus was always so proprietary? Is this the table where the transubstantiation happens, where the bread and wine become the body and the blood?

Perhaps you see this differently in our time and place, I know I do. Because I think that where people are excluded from the church, we see this as a table of inclusion. Where some cherry-pick from a laundry list of so-called “sins” and neglect hard work of parsing out context but instead demonize a particular group of people, do we see this as a table where God reaches out and pulls up another chair, drawing the circle wider, making the table bigger? Where some have placed walls around this table, making God inaccessible to others, do we hear the inspiration of Jesus himself reminding us that God is available to everyone, that purity is not a requirement to be in the presence of the Holy and that our wounds and transgressions don’t keep us from God’s – God’s love covers them, like a soft bandage or a healing balm.

That, to me, is what we celebrate at this table. So, this morning I am here to remind you that our God is too small, too limited by our own prejudices and lack of imagination, too domesticated by our adherence to some set of rules or to the laws of rationality or reason. But here’s the Good News…the table is big. There’s a seat for you, you who are fearfully and wonderfully made. Here in this simple meal we can belong and learn how to trust again. Here with this small nourishment we can trust and learn to hope again. Here with a nibble and a sip we can hope and learn how to be in the presence of the God who passes all our understanding, the God who resides here too, ready to re-imagine with us, new wine at a time in which we might not be able to imagine how things will turn out, or how to rest, or what restoration can come when the living isn’t easy. God is bigger than that, and when we cannot see how it might happen we can trust in this – God will make a way, beyond our laws, beyond the boxes in which we have carefully placed God, beyond the limit of our own vision. God will make a way.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Guest Preacher for Pentecost — Rev. Kayla Bonewell, from Church of the Open Arms, UCC and Cathedral of Hope, UCC in Oklahoma City

Contemporary ReadingWhat the Fire Gives: A Blessing for Pentecost Day by Jan Richardson

You had thought that fire only consumed, only devoured, only took for itself, leaving merely ash and memory of something you had thought, if not permanent, would be long enough, enduring enough, to be nearly eternal. So when you felt the scorch on your lips, the searing in your heart, you could not at first believe that flame could be so generous, that when it came to you — you, in your sackcloth and sorrow — it did not come to consume, to take still more than everything. What surprised you most were not the syllables that spilled from your scalded, astonished mouth —though that was miracle enough, to have words burn through what had been numb, to find your tongue aflame with a language you did not know you knew —no, what came as greatest gift was to be so heard in the place of your deepest silence, to be so seen within the blazing, to be met with such completeness by what the fire gives.

Acts 2:1-20

Today, near the 2000^thbirthday of the Christian church, give or take a few decades, we retell the birth narrative of this amazing community known to us as Christianity.

This is the story of our birth. It appeared that God was pregnant, and ready to deliver a new child who would be named “The Way,” or in later years, would earn the nickname “Christianity.” This was not God’s firstborn, as God had already given birth many times over. God had carried to full term the galaxies, solar systems, and planets. The water, air, fire, and soil of the Earth. The creatures both crawling, swimming, and winged. God had also birthed compassionate communities time and again; the Buddhists who were taught how to alleviate the suffering of sentient beings, the Jewish folk through the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, and many other tribes and peoples, too numerous to recount within this birth narrative. But, on the eve of our birth, people from all over the land were gathered together in one place for a special occasion. They were gathered to celebrate the Jewish festival of Pentecost. The word “Pentecost” came from the Greek word for “fiftieth.” Fifty days after Moses told Pharaoh to “let my people go,” after the Hebrew’s exodus from Egypt and slavery, after they watched their oppressors disappear from sight after crossing through the Red Sea, fifty days after all of that, Moses received the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. So, the people were gathered from all over to commemorate that day when God had given them instructions for how to be God’s people, how to live together with compassionate. This festival of Pentecost has been known by other names as well. The Feast of Weeks, the Day of First Fruits, or Shavuot (Shav-u-ot), but no matter what they called it, God choose this gathering to become the day of birth for the Christian church.

It’s unclear whether they knew that God was pregnant; God was certainly showing, but as we learn through experience, it can be impolite to assume pregnancy. Many tell-tale signs were apparent, none the less. For one, Jesus had promised that God would be sending them a helper, an Advocate, the Holy Spirit. Jesus’ proclamation in the 14^thchapter of John, verse 6, “I will ask Abba, who will give you another Advocate to be with you forever,” had became the equivalent of a positive pregnancy test. New life was more than just a gleam in the eye. Another indication of God’s pregnancy had to do with the cycle of life and death. We don’t always notice how the two are connected, but new birth regularly rises up after the death and passing of a loved one. It had been almost two months since the crucifixion of God’s beloved son, Jesus, whom they called “The Christ.”

So, when the Feast of Pentecost came, without warning, God’s water broke, and there was a sound like a strong gale force that filled the entire building. Like wildfire, the Holy Spirit spread throughout the people. After they were filled to the brim and overflowing with spirit, the people stood face to face and suddenly, where there had been confusion, there was now understanding. Where there had been discord, there was now unity. Where there had been distance, there was now embrace. It was all so glorious and unheard of; many thought it must be the effect of alcohol, but that was not the case. Although folks had come from different zip codes, economic status,’ educational experiences, and cultural understandings, everyone was empowered to respond to one another, not as “other” or “foreigner,” but as respected and beloved equals. All were gifted with the motivation and ability to meet one another where they were. To speak in the language and manner with which someone else was most accustomed.

Some rightfully asked, “What’s going on here.” What are we bearing witness to? That’s when Peter stood up, with Jesus’ other eleven understudies, and spoke with bold urgency. He recounted the ancient promises from the prophet Joel; “God’s spirit will erupt in a birth blazing fire. A quenching holiness that can be poured again and again upon creation, gifting it with marvel and miracle. You will know that a fresh batch of spirit has appeared whenever young folks, your very sons and daughters, begin to speak up and speak out. Whenever your elders hear God’s prompting and wisdom within their nightly REM cycles. This pouring out of God’s spirit is never discriminating. The spirt both drips and burns within the first and the last. The least and the most. The little and the large. Even those whom we discount, leave out, silence, or ignore have received barrel-fulls of holiness. So, if you want to see true wonders above and below, then you will have to face one another and see God’s spirit emanating from every living being. Call each other by your true name, which is beloved. Once you do this, my saving, healing, restoring, and redeeming power will be ignited.” That day, after God’s spirit spoke through Peter, three thousand were baptized, and the Christian church’s birth certificate was officially signed, sealed, and delivered.

Happy Birthday Church. Ours is a powerful story, and as is tradition on birthdays, we can’t help but stand against the kitchen doorframe and record how much we’ve grown this past year. Our growth is not measured in tick marks of tallness, but rather by a depth of heart, a wideness of welcome, a healing of humanity.

In the center of my mother’s bible are hand-written notes about the progress and milestones of her family. The date of her child’s first steps, a report about the last baby tooth placed underneath a pillow. What will you write down in the center of your Bible this year, regarding the church’s growth. A note about a new ministry meeting the needs of the neighborhood? An injustice confronted? A child nourished? A stranger turned friend?

At birthdays, we also look at what has not yet come to pass. When we’re young, we think by age such and such, we will know everything. Then of course, when we reach that age, we look around and think, “Really? This doesn’t feel like I thought that it would. Surely I should know more than I do by this age.”

At the age of 2000, one might think that church should have it all together. That we would have perfected our practices of faith. That good news would be in abundance for the poor, release would be readily available for those who are bound, that the oppressed would be free from burden, and everyone would have the ability to see clearly.

We are not yet too big for our britches, as we still have more maturing to do. Today is not only Pentecost, the church’s birthday, but it is also Mental Health Sunday. Since 1949 the month of May has been set aside as a time to raise awareness and educate the public about mental health and un-wellness.

In the beginning, the church was supposed to be a place where you were truly seen, for all that you had experienced, endured, overcome, and sometimes still struggled with. But over time, it became a place to dress up for. A place to bring one’s tidied-up-self, to show up looking all put together. This practice is not one of faith, but of falsehood. Jeff Brown, author, filmmaker and grounded spiritualist, says this.

Quote “So many people get judged when they refuse to put their pain away. They get judged for showing it, for speaking it, for insisting on sharing their memories of abuse with those they know. I am not talking about those overwhelming strangers with their stuff—I am talking about legitimate sharings with those they are connected with in daily life. All too often, they are fed one repressive message or another: “Don’t look back,” “What’s done is done,” “Don’t be a victim,” “Your feelings are an illusion,” “Be strong.” What is ironic about this is that those who insist on embodying and expressing their feelings are actually the courageous ones—unwilling and unable to live a false life. Their stuff is breaking through their defenses because they are tired of carrying the weight of buried truths. They want a healthier and more authentic life. Those who seek to shame their revealings are actually less courageous, turning to repressive mantras in an effort to bypass their own unresolved feelings and memories. If they can shut others down, they can remain shut down themselves. But shut down doesn’t take us anywhere good. If we don’t deal with our stuff, it deals with us. May we all speak our truths, before our buried truths destroy us. Out with the old, in with the true.” End Quote. https://www.facebook.com/SOULSHAPING/posts/10156792265745982

I think on our list of birthday goals during our next trip around the sun, we might benefit from vowing to fully see one another. Because to truly be seen is healing. And to suffer in silence is harming. Mental health and un-wellness is one of those conditions that our culture turns its back on. Something that gets whispered about, shame piled, or swept under the rug, because we don’t always know how to treat it, fix it, heal it, or live with it. But from our sacred birth story, we are given one of the most healing salves in all the world. The gift of soaking in God’s Spirit. To recognize that spirit poured out upon all around us. To turn face to face and truly see one another as beloved. When we do this, we are able to communicate in a language understood by all; the language of love, respect, dignity, and equality.

I did not awake early enough on Saturday morning to watch the royal wedding of Harry and Meghan, but I did hear the wedding sermon given by The Most Reverend Michael Bruce Curry, presiding bishop of the American Episcopal Church. His homily focused on the redemptive power of love, which the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King said will make of this old world a new one. He noted the impact that harnessing the power of fire has had upon humankind. Fire, that symbol of Pentecost. Rev. Curry preached, quote, “Fire, to a great extent, made human civilization possible. Fire, made it possible to cook food…to heat warm environments…there was no Bronze, Age without fire. No Iron Age without fire. No Industrial Revolution without fire. The advances of science and technology are greatly dependent on the human ability and capacity to take fire and use it for human good.” The Rev. compared the enormous impact of the harnessing of fire to the great healing our world couldexperience if we were able to capture the energy of another kind of fire, the energy of love.

Hear his words, “When love is the way, unselfish, sacrificial, redemptive…then no child will go to bed hungry in this world ever again. When love is the way, we will let justice roll down like a mighty stream and righteousness like an ever-flowing brook. When love is the way, poverty will become history. When love is the way, the Earth will be a sanctuary. When love is the way, we will lay down our swords and shields, down by the riverside, to study war no more. When love is the way, there’s plenty good room…for all of god’s children, because when love is the way, we actually treat each other well, like we are actually family. When love is the way, we know that god is the source of us all and we are brothers and sisters, children of god.” https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/tradition/a20754692/royal-wedding-sermon-michael-curry-full-transcript/

Sounds like a vision of Pentecost to me. May love be ourway during this next trip around the sun. Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

John 3:1-8 (CEB)

Romans 8:12-17 (CEB)

It’s all the rage these days to have a DNA test and see where you came from, sometimes a far cry from the family stories about where you came from. Have you seen the ancestry commercial where the man talks about all the lederhosen he bought and the sauerkraut he ate only to find, thanks to ancestry.com, that he’s actually Scottish? So, now he’s got kilts and eats, I don’t know…boiled sheep stomachs?

Our identity is tied up quite a bit in who our family is, or who we thinkthey are, or who we decide they are. After all, the whole business of “family” has undergone some major renovations. Sure, we have biological family, but my own family isn’t limited to that. I have siblings who are not blood relations to me, people who aren’t even in my genealogy who I call family and so do many of you. Even Jesus on the cross creates a new family with his dying breaths, connecting his mother Mary to the disciple known only as the beloved one. Family just happens.

This is the theme that Paul uses, affirming for his church members their place in God’s family. See, Paul was living at a time in which everything as tribal, including your relationship with God, or with gods. In order to accept a particular version of God, you had to become part of that family. And for Judaism, this meant a lengthy and pretty invasive process. So, Paul’s assertion is that we are adopted…Jesus’s faithfulness means weget adopted, too. Good news, that big estate of your hairdresser’s second cousin’s great nephew’s uncle left? You are an heir now, too. Paul uses the language of his time, language of inheritance and family position, to explain that Jesus has granted us an access to God that was there all the time. It is Jesus’ faithfulness, his dedication to compassion and loving kindness and relationship – across all the boundaries we set between one another – that opens up the path to God. That is, in part, what I think Jesus means when he says the kin-dom is all around us. That’s our inheritance, a world of hope and compassion that exists already, though we are too blinded by so many things to see it.

Paul also tells his readers how difficult this is for us to grasp, even to accept. Jesus says much the same to Nicodemus, inviting him to imagine that this life “in the Spirit” is like being born again, born from above, Jesus says, as God’s children, precious and beloved by God. And Nicodemus says, “Huh?” That’s a paraphrase from the Greek. It’s like we all want to be in the family, but we refuse to be in the family. I’ve had so many encounters over the past week, whether at the wonderful event at B’Nai Emunah reading the Book of Ruth for Shavu’ot, or preaching to new faces in Oklahoma City at Pentecost or hearing from friends in a variety of places where our “unity” feels as thin as tissue paper, and our family circles feel smaller. All of these encounters helped those involved to feel more connected, to see that in relationship, true compassionate, seek-to-understand relationship, we find the presence of God.

Naturally this brings me to talking about the doctrine of the Trinity. And now you’re all having your own Nicodemus moment – “Huh?” Allow me to elaborate, please. Today is Trinity Sunday or, if you are from a higher church tradition, the Feast of the Blessed and Holy Trinity. Mention of the trinity, perhaps ironic from our bible-centric point of view, is not found in the Bible. Instead it is a doctrine which some say can be found as early as the first century, but most consider a development of later Christianity – say 3^rdto 5^thcenturies – and was the cause, as doctrines often are, of many church battles, some quite literal, and innumerable declarations of heresy. The doctrine is claimed as one of our great mysteries of faith, namely that God is one but three coeternal consubstantial persons or hypostases —the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—as “one God in three Divine Persons”, or 1+1+1=1. Now if all of that is confusing to you, welcome to the club. I don’t understand the Trinity as a doctrine, even St. Augustine said it was beyond him. Yet it was a way to try and explain the unexplainable reality that God is elusive to our definitions and resistant to our rationality…and the invisible God is most clearly seen in relationships.

It has been the Celts, often labeled as heretics by the Church Catholic, who have most readily and fully illuminated any sense of trinity for me. They help because the Celts don’t feel the need to make things work out intellectually. And that’s good, because the trinity (and family for that matter) aren’t really rational things, they are experiential things. So the Celts celebrate the analogies for the trinity, like the famous three-leaf clover of St. Patrick, or the idea of water, which can be ice, vapor and liquid, though all are still water. Of course, that’s also a heresy known as modalism. But I digress…

Where the connection exists for me is the idea that God is relationship. Not God has relationship, but God IS relationship. Commentator David Lose says it this way – what the doctrine of the Trinity tries to get to is that from the very beginning of time the dynamic power of love that is at the heart of God’s identity and character can onlybe captured – and that, Paul said, in a glass, but dimly – by thinking of the love that is shared. And so God’s essential and core being has always been a giving and receiving and sharing of love that finally spills out into the whole of the universe and invites all of us into it. First through creation and God’s series of covenants, then and pre-eminently in the sending of God’s Son to demonstrate in word and deed just how much God loves us, and now as the Spirit bears witness to God’s ongoing love for us and all creation.

And that love is so large that it MUST continue, so the analogy is that God is three-in-one, and also three-in-one PLUS one, that is you and me. God’s love works by growing, a love made complete in relationship in and through ALL of God’s children. And all it takes is one quick foray into the world beyond these doors, a glance at social media comments, a single awkward family gathering at cousin Susie’s wedding, some refusing to come at all, as she marries her longtime girlfriend, news accounts of our own government not only separating families at the border, but giving kids over to human traffickers because they didn’t do the work necessary to know exactly who it was they were handing these children over to…it is easy to see that living as if God’s love is made complete in our relationships to one another is NOT where we are.

But the Good News is that it IS where God is, and the God who we honor this morning, the God who we give thanks to for another day – even the really hot ones – is the God who is Creator and creating still, the God of our ancestors, wherever they came from, and the God who knits together our wonderful and broken, dysfunctional and sometimes even dangerous families – always offering a chance to be found in our relationships to one another.

Sometimes I think that the reason people have a hard time seeing the action of God in their lives is that they don’t take God’s promises seriously enough. What if you heard a story this morning of God’s expansive love, so large that all of humanityis wrapped up in it, made heirs to the kin-dom, part of the beloved community as if it were part of our DNA. If only those tests could reveal that you are Scottish or Spanish, Indian or Indonesian, Nigerian or Nicaraguan…AND…you are also human. Part of the family of God, created by and in love, filled with the Spirit and infused with God’s undiminishable Love without exceptions. How might we see the world if we believed that? What might we do? Who might we seek to include in the family? What would it even feel like to have that kind of awakening? Would it feel like being born again?

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Acts 1:15 -16 & 21-26

The sermon begins with gathering people willing to participate in a hands-on activity and having them draw straws from my hand. The “winner” gets to preach the sermon and the pastor sits down on the pew before calling the prank off to continue…

We’re in chapter one of the Book of Acts this morning and we find the disciples – only 15 verses in – already frustrated. Reeling from the whole resurrection thing, they are forced to contend with the realization that IF he were resurrected as he said, and he has been, then that must mean the other stuff he said was true, too. So, he’s back, but things have not turned out the way they thought they would. There is no magical transformation of the world, in fact, the message is the same message we struggle with now – wait. The promise of God’s justice and mercy is yet to come. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait…seems more like the DMV than the kin-dom of God.

And then there is this crisis of leadership. Who fills the void left by Judas? One might argue that there is no void. I mean, we’re not exactly looking for more of what Judas brought to the table, right? But we do still need that 12^thdisciple – kinda rounds out the set, you know? That way you can break into three groups of four or four groups of three, or partner up with six. Makes meetings go faster. Plus Judas kept the books, which can be the hardest position to replace.

The text says that there’s about 120 Jesus followers at this time and when they decide to replace Judas, they nominate two –Joseph called Barsabbas, who was also known as Justus, and Matthias. I wonder how that all went down? Did they start an elaborate bureaucratic process where Joseph Barsabbas and Matthias submitted their resumes and had a series of interviews and deep discernment so they could finally submit them to an ecclesiastical council and thenthey could apply for the job? Or were Joseph and Matthias late to the meeting? Did they walk in about 10 minutes after the gavel and Peter and John go, “Hey, guess what guys? We went ahead and volunteered you for the vacancy.” Did they have a chance to walk away, to choose a different path, to ignore this call of the Spirit moving them into uncharted territory?

This is perhaps the relevant part of this text for us, for who are we if not the next in line to be apostles? Who are we if not here to help lead the church into a new world, on new ground, with a new vision from a God who has written a comma into our lives, not a period? There was no guidebook for the early church. As hard as that is to imagine for us with our Constitution, by-laws, and policies and procedures, the reality is that they were making it up as they went along…and this is not only accepted, it is part of our holy scripture. Even those notchosen, the ones who didn’tget the short straw, still had a part to play. Were they not still disciples, still followers of Jesus? We may not know their names, but that doesn’t matter. The willingness to hear the Spirit’s call and to follow is what matters, for more often than not God uses our everyday lives, not the extraordinary ones, for God’s work. If we can learn to listen…

Our spiritual history tells us that we stumble our way into the path that God has in mind for us. It is more improvisational than planned, for we are often faced with a hand stuffed with straws and we either get the long one, or we sometimes don’t choose at all. That only means we’re available for the next thing the Spirit has in mind, if we will keep listening. But I have some tough news. Hearing the Spirit isn’t easy. We don’t speak “spirit-ease”, at least most of us don’t. Working with the Holy Spirit is like having the best map right in front of you, but it’s in ancient sanskrit and you can’t read a bit of it.

We must learnto hear from and trust the voice of the Holy Spirit, to help each other discern Her voice, for the challenging part of our Bible-centric way of doing church is that the Bible cannot cover all the situations we encounter. We don’t, for instance, have a specific Bible verse that tell us exactly how to approach a bill from the legislature that would make it legal for adoption agencies to discriminate on the basis of “religious conviction” and still receive state funds. That bill, as many of you know, was just signed by the Governor. We have passages that some people use to judge the LGBTQ community, and some passages that tell us how we are to respond to sin amongst us – hint, it isn’t by denying people families. We have passages that tell us about the directive of love and passages that are super, super judgey and mean. But none that say, if thisprecise issue comes up, do that. We have to discern. We have to weigh all of the passages we see and make a decision about who we think God is and where we think God would have us go.

The Book of Acts, and the whole of scripture, is full of these “short straw” moments, where we are being asked to step into something new, to do something we feel unprepared for, to understand that we worship a “still-speaking God” who is not bound by what God has done in the past, nor trapped by our ability to perceive what God is doing. Where, we ought to ask ourselves often, is God placing us now in the ongoing story of the Jesus movement? Where are we being guided, at a time when “religious practice” and “individual freedom” get used to justify all kinds of mean-spirited and even evil actions? Where is God’s hand being set out for us, straws in place, at a time when being “Christian” seems to mean we focus on a few passages about specific sins and ignore the vast collection of commands that we care for the widow and orphan, even if it raises our taxes, that we shelter the weak, even if we must give up some of our strength, that we welcome the stranger, even if that is uncomfortable or inconvenient, or requires us to learn a little Spanish? Hearing the voice of the Spirit is hard, particularly when She is drowned out by the cacophony of 24-hour news, social media posts, the constant defense of our position and the endless noise of entertainment. It all shapes our hearts in feedback loops that don’t bring us closer to God.

There is no road map for this thing called life. We may want it to be neatly organized or predictable, or fair and just. We may seek in it a purity that we will never find. We may seek to get through it without getting the short straw, but you know what? That short straw- that directive to do the thing you don’t want to do, to take the step you don’t want to take, to labor in the way you don’t want to labor – that might just be the voice of the Spirit speaking directly to you, asking you to choose boldly, knowing that there is nothing you can do that with separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Nothing. The Spirit is here ready to move forward with us into a new future, with all our imperfections, standing beside us with our broken parts, beckoning to us as we drift off the map with a holy GPS…recalculating, recalculating…

The world needs your voice – YOUR voice – so make time to listen to the call of the Holy Spirit and then say, send me, use me, fill me.

Pick a straw. The Spirit is calling.